Conservatives Who Deny That Fascism Is Far Right Extremism are Denying History
This includes the Leader of Canada's Opposition
A young Conservative from Alberta who is vying for a Conservative nomination for Member of Parliament, wrote the following on Twitter:
I replied with the following - to which I will add that Pierre Poilievre is also spreading the same lie - for the same reason.
This is dangerously ignorant of history, the economy, politics, the rule of law, government.
First, if you want a good definition of fascism, in 1938, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
That is what defines fascism - and how that overlaps with what we see around the world now: private oligarchs propping up leaders who make the economy run for their benefit.
That is what people in Europe were all fighting to get away from in the 1700s and 1800s: feudalism. A permanent, unelected minority who owned everything, and who could live without working because everyone else paid them rent.
People had different visions of how to do it, but everyone was looking for a better way of running society, so that people had a say in how they were governed, and so they had some rights and freedoms. There were major debates about it.
There were libertarians who wanted little or no government, there were liberals who were democrats and more "centrist" and there were communists.
Technically, they were all socialists because they thought that when it came to certain aspects of the law, some decisions should be up to a democratically elected government, not powerful private individuals, to make.
It's not about making everyone equal: it's about recognizing that for certain rights to be meaningful, they cannot be for sale, and that everyone is supposed to be equal at the ballot box and when they face justice.
However, there were two camps about how to deal with political reform. "Social Democrats" believed that a democratic governments could bring in reforms and work with aristocrats, or oligarchs, and have a mixed private-public economy.
All wealthy countries have a mixed private-public economy. It may be military spending, it may be health care, it may be oil companies or banks. It's not an accident: it's because when government is good at providing insurance that stabilizes a society, especially in a crisis, it lowers risk which increases returns.
Canada is a mostly centre-right liberal social democracy. The "liberal" is not the political party.
It means we as a country are constitutionally committed to freedom that is a consequence of the rule of law.
The Rule of Law is the basic idea that everyone is supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law. It applies to everybody.
That is not government overreach: that is a cornerstone of the rule of law, human rights, and justice in a democracy. It means that even the most powerful can be held to account, as the powerless can be.
However, ensuring that fairness and rule of law requires intense amounts of oversight and enforcement: hence, government and an independent judicial branch.
By contrast, Communists like Marx did not believe that capitalists would share power and that a violent revolution would be required to replace them. Marx based his model of the Communist state on the corporation. When he analyzed capitalism, he was impressed by its incredible powers of production, and recognized how orderly corporations were, compared to the chaotic market. 19th century corporations were planned centrally - so would be the Communist State.
The Russian Revolution involved murdering the Royal Family, and many aristocratic families were murdered. After the First World War, Bolsheviks committed to political violence. The point here is that there is no commitment to the peaceful transition of power, which is another fundamental tenet of democracy. Fascists presented themselves as a far-right response to this.
They are often either military dictatorships or police states, and you're controlled by both government and places of employment. The difference is that in far left regimes, your company is owned by government, and in far right regimes, your company owns the government.
Arthur Okun quoted Hayek quoting disillusioned communist Leon Trotsky:
“In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” I cherish this rare occasion when I can agree with both Hayek and Trotsky!”
Also - in communist dictatorships, religion was banned so it wouldn't compete with the power of the state (or the state religion). There is just one party, and no real elections.
Both far-left and far-right appeal to desperation, and they both promise less "government," and still do.
Engels predicted the "withering away of the state" because he thought that if you brought in socialism, you wouldn't require the coercive enforcement of the law.
This is similar to the libertarian promise of less government - which is usually a rejection of the rule of law. This is where far left and far right meet - it's in lawlessness.
Lawlessness and anarchy do not lead to freedom, because without the law, no one can be held accountable. That is the whole problem with the radicals of left and right, and always have been: they want to tear down the whole system and have no plan to replace it, because not replacing it is the point.
The reality is, the law needs enforcing to keep society functioning. You need safeguards on safeguards on safeguards to prevent and root out corruption.
The government's job is supposed to be to serve the public interest, and enforce justice fairly.
Neither Canada nor the UK have a separation of Church and State. Our head of state (the King) IS the head of the Anglican Church. But the job of the state is NOT to enforce religious morality, because when faith and state are one, it fundamentally denies citizens freedom, and what's more, it corrupts both religion and state.
However, in the last 40 years, the political spectrum has been steadily drifting right.
As evidence: Ronald Reagan ran bigger deficits to stimulate the U.S. economy after 1980 than Obama did after 2008.
Lots of people who call themselves "libertarians" or conservatives are actually anarchists. Their idea of freedom is that no one gets to tell them what to do, which is a fundamental rejection of the rule of law.
The reality is that many are basically calling for a modern return to feudalism, where our lives are run by private oligarchs, who are not subject to the law, because the state is too weak to enforce it.
Today, it's not just "left" or "centre-left" parties that are being called "socialist" or "communist." Many centre, and even centre-right parties, policies and politicians are, because no one pays attention to the actual policies.
There is a horrible brutality to politics and discourse generally today, and it is mutually dehumanizing, because fundamentally, it's not about any kind of exchange at all, it's just trying to give people reasons to hate one another. That is the real content of most public political debate There is no content at all, and it is just people using different words for "bad".
And that is one thing that is lost, because no one seems to talks about "liberal democracy" anymore, is that we live in an age of collective rights.
The radical left and radical right place the rights of the collective over the rights of the individual. This means when the individual is wronged, they may be denied justice if a finding of guilt would threaten the power structure of the collective.
Always placing collective rights first is a constraint on freedom that inevitably leads to injustice, for this basic reason: it takes away what should be a fundamental individual right to speak truth to power. (With the emphasis on "truth".)
Not accusations, not name-calling - due process, evidence.
The ultimate brake on corruption is accountability, and that only happens when individuals can stand up and call it out, and that multiple institutions have the independence and resources to enforce it.
The history of the last 40 years in "developed" nations has included outlawing Keynes, and agreement after agreement that seeks to limit the power of democratically elected governments through legislation and reduced funding. This is a radical and extreme vision that is fundamentally undemocratic, and undermines freedom, because freedom for a few is not freedom.
This far-right anarchy treats the very basic institutions of democratic government and equal treatment under the law as "radical". That is because they treat "freedom" as "the law not applying to them". That is not freedom: that is impunity and corruption.
I'm not going to pretend that our political system is some utopia, because it's not, but our debate is being distorted by people on the extreme right who cast basic democratic rights and principles as being extreme, while they seek to dismantle the institutions that exist to safeguard and enforce our rights and freedoms.”
Anyone looking to understand the difference between these systems should watch the chilling documentary from the 1990s: The Nazis: a Warning from History - you can part 1 here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq1ym0
Hitler was made Chancellor by Conservative politicians who thought they could control him, because they were politically aligned. Tens of millions of people died as a consequence.
This ignorance about the most important events in world history is appalling. These are global conflicts in which Canada was involved. 44,000 Canadians died, and the events shaped profoundly shaped our history, economy and politics.
To say this has debased our politics is a disgusting understatement. This is radical right political revisionism and denial. This is not what conservatism in Canada used to be. Apparently it’s what it has become.
-30-
•DFL
It's awful how uneducated Canadians are. We have to admit that our media and work culture have kept Canadians in the dark about basic political concepts. Having to ramp up from a 35-hour to a 60-hour workweek in order to care for kids leaves Canadian minds too tired to consume media that makes them wiser. Furthermore, many Canadian news publishers are operating at a level that doesn't provide context for anything they report on. Some even commit false neutrality.
There is mistaken logic behind the confusion that Poilievre is taking advantage of in people. Even as you explain the differences between Stalinism and Nazism, you show how they end in similar anarchy for everyday people. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact sought to bring supposedly opposite regimes in concert with one another as essentially the same arrangement. In the 1930s and 40s, supposed Leftists supported Fascism in an accelerationist strategy in favour of Russia, so it was all the same to them. Now, when normal people experience white and whitewashed "leftists" practicing authoritarianism and rendering advocacy groups useless, they learn Horseshoe Theory.
It's helpful that you make the distinction between how the end-result of both extremisms looks, and how their sources bring it about. People think they're opposing the bad thing when really they're just participating in the horseshoe. It's absolutely vital that you lay out what the hell we are trying to protect, because people actually have no idea. You're ungaslighting to those of us with the time and energy to read essays. And we need to see the language all the more because we have to repair the undereducations we received in the educational systems around Canada.
I decided to comment because a friend said that Poilievre should be embarrassed to have been caught claiming National Socialism is Socialism. My friend has no idea what people are like. Poilievre is not going to be embarrassed, because this is not a mistake. And there are perfectly unsurprising reasons why Canadians are susceptible to this strategy.